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Polish: Enough Indo-European Similarity to Make Picking up Words Easier?

Polish: Enough Indo-European Similarity to Make Picking up Words Easier?

Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 12:51 PM
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Polish: Enough Indo-European Similarity to Make Picking up Words Easier?

I’ve been so happy that I’ve reached a level of comprehension in the spoken and written Dutch language that I would have thought impossible two years ago when I only knew a tiny bit. I’ve come to the conclusion that this has less to do with some terrific linguistic aptitude on my part, but rather that words tend to *stick* since both are Germanic languages and due to having a common ancestral root, share many features in common such as logic in word formation, cadence, etc….

I’m able to communicate as well in French fluently having lived in Quebec 15 years and can get by, although sometimes haltingly, in Spanish. I wonder there though too, if those two languages, started in grade school and university respectively, came to me more easily at the time due to the many Latin and even French borrowings in the English language? (I’m in my early forties now.)

This summer when I’ll have some free time, I was thinking I might like to take a course to better my German at the Goethe Institut here in Montreal. However, I thought maybe it would be better for my mind to try a completely different language group. While I want to get out of my comfort zone so some extent, I’m thinking I might stick it out and not lose motivation if the language is within the Indo-European family of languages. Polish came to mind as I believe it’s the most spoken Slavic language that uses the Roman alphabet, and might be fun at some point to combine a trip to Germany with next door Poland.

I listened to some introductory videos on learning Polish on youtube and found that most of what I heard and read sounded quite alien (meaning bore little to no relation to the languages I do know) with a few exceptions. Example of exceptions: what sounded like “voda” was “water”, the word for furniture sounded vaguely like the French “meuble” but really very few.

I find there are commonalities between Romance and Germanic languages, despite being different branches of “Indo-European languages” (German/Dutch: nacht; English: night; French: nuit; Spanish: noche; Italian: notte; Dutch: vader; English: father; Spanish: padre).

My question is this: for those of you who have tried a Slavic language (could be Polish,Czech, etc…), while I’m sure vocabulary building is not as fast as with a Germanic/Romance language, were you able to make ties with Germanic/Latin-based languages that made the language learning somewhat easier? An Indo-European language commonality if you will. Or was it mostly like Chinese, basically starting from scratch?
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 01:07 PM
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I found it almost impossible to pronounce Polish words, even the few words of politeness I tried to remember. Same with Czech. I also got confused between the Czech word and the Polish word for thank you. I finally gave up. I think you have to be born in a Slavic country to learn the language!

I used this site for pronunciation.

http://thepolskiblog.co.uk/2008/09/g...polish-part-3/
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 02:21 PM
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I'm not an expert on this. However, I found some, but very few, English/Germanic/Latin cognates when studying the Russian language.
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 02:28 PM
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I studied Russian for two years and found much the same as Dave_Ohio, and there was so much else going on to learn that the very few cognates didn't help a lot. Tough language! And I understand that Polish and Russian are quite closely related, in that Poles and Russians (maybe depending on regional differences) can normally understand one another.
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 02:51 PM
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Polish and Russian are not closely related. There may a few words that are similar but that is about it. The only reason that Polish people can understand Russian is because they were forced to learn Russian at school.
I speak fluent Polish. I do not know Russian and when I hear it I do not understand it.

As for other slavic languages, yes there may be a few similarities, and we can probably end up understanding each other, but that is about it.
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 03:01 PM
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Polish is a difficult language to learn for a foreigner. The pronunciation, spelling, grammar, vocabulary etc will all test your resolve. For travel purposes, there is really no need to as enough English is spoken, especially by younger people and it is a young country.
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 03:45 PM
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My knowledge of English, French and German (in varying degrees) was of practically no use in Poland.
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 04:48 PM
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It is true that for a native English speaker it is relatively easy to pick up both romantic and germanic languages - since english is a germanic language with very strong romantic overlays due to the Norman invasion:

Samples: flowers (flores, fleurs) and blooms (bloomen); forest and woods etc.

So it is relatively easy once you know a little to intuit a fair amount and once you learn one - Spanish for instance - it's way easy to comprehend basic French, Italian and Portugese - as with German and Dutch and the Scandinavian languages.

My b did very well in local neighborhoods in Rome (primarily non English speakers) with just bad high school Spanish.

My experience is that slavic and other european languages are not similarly easy - since both root words and grammar is different (although I must admit I just go for being understood and don;t bother with tenses or correct sentence construction). A friend of mine who took some latin in school and had decent German found Polish to be extremely difficult - even though her grandmother was and she heard quite a bit as a child -and gave up in frustration after about 6 months. (Apparently what her grandmother spoke was nothing like what she was being taught - with even very few words identical.)
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 05:00 PM
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If your objective is to get out of your linguistic comfort zone Polish would be a good choice. I grew up in an area populated by many Eastern European immigrants and heard Polish, Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Russian spoken but never learned to distinguish among them. When I studied Russian it helped that the sounds were not entirely new to me but it still did require a lot of effort beyond phonemic comfort.

Russian and Polish are somewhat related in that they both fall on the Slavic portion of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European tree but they are on different sub-branches. Polish, Czech and Slovak are on the Western branch, Russian falls on the Eastern branch along with Ukrainian and Belorussian. There are some cognates discernible across these branches but none of them are from the Romantic or Germanic branches you have previously studied.
The difference among Slavic languages was driven home to me our first day in Prague. I expected my knowledge of Russian would allow me to at least figure out the rudiments of a menu. Such hubris - thought I was ordering some sort of fish but it wound up being a kind of sweet and sour chicken.
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 07:22 PM
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Polish is a difficult language. There are a lot of CZ, and SZ sounds that really are quite difficult for your tongue to get around. I speak Polish at home with my husband as well as English. our children understand Polish and know exactly what we are saying, but they do not speak it apart from a few phrases. And it is hysterical when they do.

From the end of the 1950's children in Polish schools were taught a second language - Russian.
There was no choice about learning another language. Because of Poland's ties with Russia this was the only foreign language taught.

From the mid 1980's Russian was dropped as a compulsory foreign language and more and more children are learning English and other European languages.

So that is why when going to Poland your English, French, German or Spanish is really of no use as the older generation do not understand these languages. Although this is changing it will take a while as the new generation of children grow up. However, in some of the bigger cities you will find more people do speak and understand English.

Also in Poland there are some regions that may have their own little dialect - mostly is some of the rural areas.

The Russian alphabet it different to the Polish and other slavic language alphabet. It is more like the Greek alphabet.

So we need to understand that just because all these countries were once part of the Eastern bloc, they actually do not sound the same.
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 08:02 PM
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All your personal anecdotes are great!

I know that the languages I do know only are limited help in understanding the "Germanic" Scandinavian languages let alone a language in the Slavic branch of Indo-European languages such as Polish, but I thought they might give a hook to build vocabulary if I took time to study. I'm beginning to think maybe there's a small hook, although your words make me think it would be limited. Every little bit helps though learning a new language.

I was looking again at that Introductory Polish video. With a bit of imagination, I'm seeing (in some cases maybe just imagining) more relationships with the languages I do know.

"Nowi Lokatorzy" reminds me a bit in look of a English/French/Latin hybrid "New/Nuevo/Nouveau Locataires" (New Tenants).
"A ty" reminds me a bit of "et tu?" ("and you"?).
"Mam na imie Magda" almost sounds like a distorted version of its English meaning: "my name is Magda"

Pronunciation indeed seems like it might be tough but it's fun to dream nevertheless.
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 10:18 PM
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I speak Polish and German, and now, living in Austria, I hear Slovakian, Slovenian, Czech, Hungarian, and Russian but have little idea what people are saying beyond basic greetings. The same is true with German spoken here on occasion because it is Austrian German.

For fun I began learning Arabic language a few months ago. Talk about being out of one's linguistic comfort zone! I passed the Level 1 course, however, and am slogging through Level 2.
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Old Mar 23rd, 2013, 10:46 PM
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fourfortravel - glad you just said!!!!

I am sure that language originated from some basic sounds/words. It would be interesting to read up on the origins of language and how it changed/evolved.

an interesting example is the word wine: in polish it is wino (but remember in Polish a 'w' is pronounced as a 'v' and a 'L' with a stroke through it is a 'w') and in Italian it is Vino. and in French it is Vin.
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Old Mar 24th, 2013, 01:26 AM
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Daniel,

certainly if you are up for a challenge, Polish would be a good place to start. like you I'm pretty comfortable with several european languages [French, german and italian, in my case plus english of course] but polish was a whole new experience. we'd just about got the hang of how to ask for two beers [diwa piwa prosze] before we left and that had taken 3 days.

if you were going to give it a go, I would think that finding a native polish speaker to help you would be essential.
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Old Mar 24th, 2013, 02:59 AM
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FWIW, from Frederick Bodmer's The Loom of Language (first published 1944) -

"Like the Semitic family, the Slavonic group shows comparatively little internal differentiation. Slavonic languages form a clearly recognizable unit, including languages which differ no more than Swedish and Danish or Spanish and Italian. It is easier for a Pole to understand a Russian than for a German to understand a Swede, or for a Parisian to understand a Spaniard or an Italian." p. 414

"There is no royal road to fluency in a language which shares the grammatical intricacies of Sanskrit, Lithuanian, or Russian. It is therefore impossible to give the reader who wishes to learn Russian any good advice except to take the precaution of being born and brought up in Russia."
p. 415

[Not that I'd know of course; I'm still struggling with my native English.]
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Old Mar 24th, 2013, 04:33 AM
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I think there are differences between South Slavic and [North?] Slavic as well. When I made a halting attempt at Serbo-Croatian a few years ago, Bulgarian seemed more familiar than Czech, but a relative found Polish vocabulary easy but grammar chaotic after taking Czech, which at least as a written language is rationalized, if I understand correctly, like Modern Hebrew or Irish Gaelic.

So good luck.

I can still order beer ("pivo"), an essential skill.
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Old Mar 24th, 2013, 05:47 AM
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This is great. I've enjoyed reading about all your experiences and insight.

Millie2112-- The origin of languages absolutely fascinate me as they bring sometimes bizarre evidence of how we came to be. Such as, how was it that the Galatians in central Turkey ended up speaking a Celtic language? Why and how are Finnish and Hungarian alike, but so different from the Indo-European languages? Why is Basque unrelated to anything else on the continent? Interesting stuff!

I looked for the fun of it at some Wikipedia pages in Polish vs. German. The Polish was unintelligible to my eyes while the German I could piece together meaning surprisingly often with what I know of Dutch, English and my one semester of German moons ago.
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Old Mar 24th, 2013, 05:56 AM
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Daniel - if you're looking for the greatest reward for the lest effort [tends to be my approach] it looks as if german should be your next port of call.
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Old Mar 24th, 2013, 06:27 AM
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annhig-- Greatest reward for least effort . It's true there is only so much time in day for language study effort, and for this reason, I'd been leaning toward German. Plus, the resources for German would be better with the well-liked Goethe Institut here. At the same time, there's a part of me that feels that maybe I should challenge myself and thinks that a Slavic language would open my eyes to a whole new linguistic way. But it's not gone unnoticed that everyone here is saying that learning Polish is pretty tough.
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Old Mar 24th, 2013, 06:40 AM
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Daniel - going by your success in learning Dutch, you're going to romp through german, and have a lot of fun using it, whereas the road to polish success is likely to be rather rockier.

and Polish will still be there once you've conquered german!
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